Pěchouček's 'Art Lessons'

Michal Pěchouček's exhibition "Art Lessons" at Prague City Gallery's House at the Stone Bell is divided, like night and day, into two clear-cut, seemingly unrelated sections, each given its own floor in the Gothic building. Ostensibly, the first section is devoted to photography and the second to painting, but it is quickly apparent that the concept of the show is not as straightforward as it first seems.

The "photography" section, which the artist describes as "the story of photography," uses meticulously constructed illusion to produce a cerebral visual game, while the "painting" section, which Pěchouček calls "the story of painting," is more accessible, providing a tactile and emotional epilogue to the formalist and intellectual prologue. The works in this section are not really paintings but multimedia assemblages, acting almost like a storyboard, in which a single theme, intimacy, is explored in different ways.

Pěchouček, born in 1973, is a significant figure on the Czech art scene. The winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for young artists in 2003, Pěchouček first attracted attention as a painter, though he also works extensively with video, photography and even literary forms. There is a great deal of overlap among the various media he uses, but at heart Pěchouček is a storyteller.

"Lesson One" centers around Pěchouček's recent "Filmogram" series, its name suggesting some hybrid of contact-printed photograms and filmic sequencing. The first group of Filmograms seems to consist of strips of poorly exposed and developed film. The first strip seems unexceptional, but in subsequent strips the unexposed interstices between individual frames start to incline at various angles, frames grow bigger or smaller, and perforations are elongated or condensed. It is all a visual game alluding to perceptions of time lapse, intervals of time, and temporal and spatial voids.

Another piece involves strips of film in which the camera seems to have been malfunctioning.

These photos repeatedly capture a chair but are out of sync, the frames unevenly spaced and the chair often repeated within the same frame. This is another elaborate illusion that involved fixing a chair to the ceiling, among other things.

If not for the artist's elucidation of his techniques and intent on a guided tour of the show, the viewer might feel rather in the dark (an illuminating essay might be found in the forthcoming exhibition catalog, but at press time it was not yet available). To interpret Pěchouček's work as abstruse formalist exercises wouldn't be entirely off the mark.

In the final room of "Lesson One," there is a circular installation of a time-lapse record of an entire year, charting the changes in light over 24 hours at weekly intervals. Pěchouček begins on the winter solstice and divides the piece not into 12 calendar months but into 13 lunar months.

This circle of light and dark gradations conveys a sense of eternal recurrence in the subtle progressions of light and time that elude us from day to day.

After the cerebral formalism of the first part of the show, which keeps viewers at arm's length even while bringing them in close to look at the small-scale contact prints, "Lesson Two" is a totally different story, brimming with intimacy. Although the canvases are traditionally mounted on stretchers, it is a stretch to call them paintings. Pěchouček first stitches embroidery-like pictures on the material by machine, then sews on items of real clothing, towels and bed linen before drawing in parts of the figures with pencil, with just a few painted passages.

"I am not painting, but applying," the artist says.

A series titled "Time for Bed" at first is all innocence. Girls dressed in their nightshirts are preparing for sleep, some reading a book before tuck-in or gazing up at the moon. These are followed by pictures of boys wearing pajama bottoms or boxer shorts and heading off with a towel to wash up before bed.

"It is a story about people alone with their intimacy," Pěchouček says.

Some of the canvases have clever formal links to the first part of the show. In Time for Bed XX, a girl gazes at two moons in different phases, bringing an element of temporal sequencing to the otherwise static picture. In some of the pictures with boys, painted white bars appear, like the interstices between film frames in "Lesson One."

In the large room on the second floor, the figures start getting lost, and the textiles become more prominent (a viewer has to come in close to make out the beige stitching on beige canvas). These canvases depict young couples in Kama Sutra positions in bed. Textile appliqués convey narrative details: pajama legs hastily pushed down around a man's ankles, a woman tangled up in her pajamas, a stack of neatly folded pajamas beside the couple, a heap of crumpled nightwear and bed linens on the floor, two towels draped over a white screen.

Toward the end of the show, Time for Bed XXXIII features a chair with a pajama shirt hanging over it; near the top of the canvas are two eclipsed circles or moons, constructing another formal link.

Pěchouček creates a strong connection, and perhaps the crux of the show, by literally uniting a man and a woman in the pictures and, significantly, by combining the traditionally female techniques of embroidery and appliqué with the traditionally male-dominated fields of painting and drawing.

(Pěchouček is not the only Czech male artist working with sewn textiles; he is joined by fellow Chalupecký laureate Jiří Černický and Svatopluk Klimeš, for example.)

What ultimately unites "Art Lessons" is far more than a formal device. Pěchouček ties together the two parts of the exhibition precisely through stark contrasts: of formalist temporal exercises with dreamy moments when time seems to stand still, of dark and light, of male and female, of "high art" with "woman's craft," of cool intellect and warm-blooded intimacy. The artist is not actually presenting two stories, but rather two seemingly opposing yet inseparably interconnected sides of one story. It is a story about the discontinuities and continuities of time, space and the self.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com